Greenberg describes kitsch as any form of media that can be easily digested by the beholder. This includes film, magazines, advertisements, television shows, paperback novels, and cloying, sentimental art. Kitsch emerged, he argues, with the influx of the peasants into urban centers. These peasants acquired a “universal literacy” out of necessity, but did not possess the leisure time to develop a taste for high culture. Instead, they turned to kitsch, which was readily available, easy to appreciate, and even easier to discard after its use.

"The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends… It draws its lifeblood, sort to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience."

Here Greenberg explains the parasitic nature of kitsch. Without a high art, or an “accumulated experience,” he argues, kitsch cannot exist. This argument is somewhat tenuous. The examples of kitsch, such as Norman Rockwell paintings, that Greenberg provides could very well exist without some high cultural authority present to push it forward. Still, Greenberg says that kitsch is a failure of modern capitalist and Fascist governments, as they did not educate their citizens to appreciate true beauty. A Socialist, Greenberg believes the only way to correct this problem is to adopt a socialist government, where, he says, the peasant will have enough leisure time to become “conditioned” to appreciate superior culture.

Good art, and “superior culture” can be achieved when the artist devotes his or her attention purely to the medium used. Greenberg bases this argument on the practices of the Old Masters. Their patrons, always of the higher ruling classes, chose their subject matter, and so these artists only had to devote their attention to formal concerns, and medium. Greenberg extends this to his era by welcoming abstract expressionism as the new formal tradition—avant-garde in aesthetic, but fitting in with the same tradition as the Old Masters. In these works, subject matter is completely lost, and instead the sole focus is on the flatness of the canvas and the medium of the paint. Mark Rothko and the color-field painters would become among the favorites of Greenberg, as their works were large in scale, evoking a simple spirituality, and acknowledged the flatness and field-like space of the canvas. Of course, the work of Jackson Pollock is the perfect example of Greenberg's vision.

Greenberg’s argument, though it embraces the abstract expressionist avant-garde, is still a very traditional one. It positions art above the masses and perpetuates the idea of an authoritative voice on art.